The RL Politics of CN Alliances

[brokenhead]

Being a political junkie, I've noticed all the RL politics spilling into Planet Bob in subtle or not-so-subtle ways, and I'm wondering if it's possible to create a spectrum that places alliances in left, centrist, or right categories. Perhaps it's not possible, given the multiple perspectives that come together in one alliance. But are there tendencies we can discern? These tendencies can appear in 3 (maybe more) ways:

1. Explicit political stance: e.g., the Anti-Hippie alliance and other self-styled "conservative" alliances. How much of these names is IC and how much OOC? How does it determine the make-up of the membership?

2. Implicit political stance: e.g., the Pacifico-centric, self-aggrandizing and self-justifying tenor of Francoism as a philosophy may push the NPO to the right; the somewhat anarchic, loosely collective politics of "Karma" may push those alliances to the left.

3. Things important individual nations say: e.g., ChairmanHal sticking up for Sarah Palin or Ivan Moldavi's Nietzschean pronouncements may push Valhalla and NSO to the right and left, respectively.

These kinds of determinations are necessarily going to be generalizing, even reductive, and I'm not trying to shoehorn any individual or alliance into a category. Nevertheless, I thought it would be fun to see what kinds of spectrums people suggest, and if any consensus can be reached.

Edit: One more question: is Bob as a whole a conservative or progressive planet?

Edited September 2, 2009 by brokenhead

[Ogaden]

CN politics is different, the only carry-over is liberalism <--> authoritarianism. You could argue a sort of socialism <--> free market dichotomy with alliances that have a lot of starter aid and aid programs beyond just tech dealing to grow small nations are more "socialist" while those that stick to the tech dealing to grow small nations and have little to no growth aid are "free market". There are others too though.

Idealist/Friends>Infra <--> Pragmatist/Infra Hugger

Internationalist/Treaty Whore <--> Isolationist/Neutral Menace

Edited September 2, 2009 by James Dahl

[brokenhead]

CN politics is different, the only carry-over is liberalism <--> authoritarianism. You could argue a sort of socialism <--> free market dichotomy with alliances that have a lot of starter aid and aid programs beyond just tech dealing to grow small nations are more "socialist" while those that stick to the tech dealing to grow small nations and have little to no growth aid are "free market". There are others too though.

Idealist/Friends>Infra <--> Pragmatist/Infra Hugger

Internationalist/Treaty Whore <--> Isolationist/Neutral Menace

Precisely - I think you've nailed down a few more parameters, each of which is roughly left <---> right organized. If it were possible to rank each alliance on each of these spectrums, perhaps we could be minimally reductive and place them in a category. That sounds like too much work to me, though. I just want a general sense of the political terrain.

[Ogaden]

I disagree, binary categorization such as these would serve no purpose and would render the results meaningless. And how to even classify things like neutrality or internationalism? Neither of those are inherently left or right wing, nor is authoritarianism or liberalism. The "left" and "right" are essentially archaic terms left over from a bygone and largely dead era between Whigs vs Tories, took on a new meaning when the Tories basically absorbed the Whigs and it then became Tories vs Socialists.

The closest to such a state of affairs was the "Friends > Infra" thing, which almost established a binary world view, but that world view altered its opponents' a long time ago and now we are back to ambiguity.

[Captain Flinders]

I disagree, binary categorization such as these would serve no purpose and would render the results meaningless.

Meaningless but entertaining. Sounds like CN to me.

[Ivan Moldavi]

The NSO is a stylized totalitarian military alliance that uses some Star Wars illusion to generate internal debate and philosophy. I don't believe it could be moved "leftist" by my claim that basing an alliance philosophy on the actions of its detractors is a failed plan.

[Swiper]

The economy of the New Polar Order is highly controlled, to a higher degree than starter aid and aid programs to help grow newbies. I really shouldn't go too much further into detail

[brokenhead]

I disagree, binary categorization such as these would serve no purpose and would render the results meaningless. And how to even classify things like neutrality or internationalism? Neither of those are inherently left or right wing, nor is authoritarianism or liberalism. The "left" and "right" are essentially archaic terms left over from a bygone and largely dead era between Whigs vs Tories, took on a new meaning when the Tories basically absorbed the Whigs and it then became Tories vs Socialists.

The closest to such a state of affairs was the "Friends > Infra" thing, which almost established a binary world view, but that world view altered its opponents' a long time ago and now we are back to ambiguity.

Actually, I'm not proposing a binary world view but a continuum. There's a difference. Also, the "left" and the "right" definitely still do hold meaning, although their modern forms did congeal in the 19C, as you say. Read any current political, cultural, or philosophical work, and things are considered in terms of "left" and "right." Just because they are reductive does not mean they aren't, in some sense, real.

I would say that neutrality or isolationism is typically viewed as a right-wing stance; e.g., libertarianism. Internationalism has its left-wing (anti-WTO, Amnesty International, diasporic and "third world" collectivities) and right-wing (corporate imperialism, free trade) elements, the latter of which blend into the neo-liberalism of, say, Clinton.

Authoritarianism in its fascist incarnations is right-wing; in its Stalinist incarnations is left-wing (although some people would say that Stalin simply warped the leftist politics of Lenin).

On the surface, then, if NSO is a "totalitarian military alliance," it would undoubtedly be classified in RL as right-wing. But authoritarian ways of organizing alliances on CN seem to be the only successful way to do so. So does the game (which emphasizes military conflict and hierarchical social orders) inherently push alliances toward the right? Are there any leftist alliances out there, either in IC terms ("socialist" aid programs to new nations, for instance) or OOC terms (alliances whose culture, membership, or ideals lean to the left?).

Edit: in other words, for a political simulation game, does CN create a political climate so homogeneous that efforts to disentangle real differences ultimately become "meaningless"? This would seem to be the conclusion of those CN cynics who remark that the entire game revolves around endless cycles of attack and retribution. Phenomena like neutral alliances and Vox Populi are actually quite radical in the sense that they try to get around the very parameters of the game.

Edited September 2, 2009 by brokenhead

[Melchior]

I think one tendency that many members of the community agree on is that it can't really be translated into RL or OOC politics.

Edited September 2, 2009 by Melchior

[brokenhead]

I think one tendency that many members of the community agree on is that it can't really be translated into RL or OOC politics.

Is the game really completely autonomous from RL, then? There is no possible translation? What does it mean, in an abstract sense, that thousands of people from all over the world come together quite frequently to connect, in sometimes quite involved ways? Does this inform people's RL politics, and vice versa? How?

Edited September 2, 2009 by brokenhead

[MTTezla]

The only direct connections that I see are when there are specifically-designed political alliances. Presently, the Anti-Hippy (micro)alliance and The International are the only strong examples that come to mind. On the other hand, we have strong leftists (which make up the majority of the internet-game playing population thanks to the fact that they are demographically skewed towards youth) joining militaristic alliances. That kind of diversity of players vs. government style makes it very hard to categorize the players by alliance policy.

[Delta1212]

The problem with trying to translate political philosophies from real life into CyberNations is that a fairly substantial portion of real life politics deals with economic issues. In CN, the number of variable methods for running an economy are quite limited and the pros and cons of each are patently obvious. Aid falls to new nations and tech deal. Are each more efficient at accomplishing certain things and can be utilized by an alliance depending on what they wish to accomplish. There is very little debate put into what economic methods are "better" except insofar as making variations on a few basic templates more efficient, and even then the entire system is simplistic enough that you can mathematically work out the exact efficiency of any one method to compare with another. This means that economic philosophy rarely if ever enters into political philosophy here, which is already a radical change from real life.

This pretty much relegates all political philosophy to government structure and foreign policy. The debate between democratic and autocratic government in CN has been going for a long time. Ultimately though, it's relatively pointless. The manner in which the world functions means it is incredibly easy to

leave an alliance and go find a new one. We don't really have any of the same issues here as we would in real life where moving to another country is a major hassle and often a financial burden even assuming your government isn't trying to stop you from leaving. Even the autocratic alliances here have a strong democratic element inherent in the membership's ability to vote with their feet. Because of that it is very difficult for a government to successfully oppress it's own people and so the surface structure of the government pretty much falls to whatever works best for the alliance in question.

That leaves foreign policy, which is essentially the only area that political philosophy has any relevance in CN because it's the only time views really compete with each other. In this arena we have realpolitik versus idealism, we have competing views on treaties with regard to number, style and treatment. How do create a scale for the competing beliefs that: you should sign lots of treaties, you should sign no treaties, you should sign nothing higher than an MDP, you should sign nothing with an A clause, you shouldn't join blocs, you shouldn't have overlapping blocs, treaties shouldn't chain, treaties should chain, treaties in their cancelation period should still be followed, treaties in their cancelation period should be ignored, treaties should only be signed with close friends, treaties should be signed for political advantage, treaties should be followed to the letter, the spirit should always be followed regardless of the letter, alliances can't join a war without treaaty obligations, alliances can do whatever they want, then you get into the myriad number of potential CBs and which are valid, what constitues aggression, declaration of war or CB-worthy action.

There is very little correlation between any one of these beliefs and holding any other, so even where you are able to create a scale from leeft to right, trying to map an alliance to it would give you nonsensical results.

[brokenhead]

The problem with trying to translate political philosophies from real life into CyberNations is that a fairly substantial portion of real life politics deals with economic issues. In CN, the number of variable methods for running an economy are quite limited and the pros and cons of each are patently obvious. Aid falls to new nations and tech deal. Are each more efficient at accomplishing certain things and can be utilized by an alliance depending on what they wish to accomplish. There is very little debate put into what economic methods are "better" except insofar as making variations on a few basic templates more efficient, and even then the entire system is simplistic enough that you can mathematically work out the exact efficiency of any one method to compare with another. This means that economic philosophy rarely if ever enters into political philosophy here, which is already a radical change from real life.

This pretty much relegates all political philosophy to government structure and foreign policy. The debate between democratic and autocratic government in CN has been going for a long time. Ultimately though, it's relatively pointless. The manner in which the world functions means it is incredibly easy to

leave an alliance and go find a new one. We don't really have any of the same issues here as we would in real life where moving to another country is a major hassle and often a financial burden even assuming your government isn't trying to stop you from leaving. Even the autocratic alliances here have a strong democratic element inherent in the membership's ability to vote with their feet. Because of that it is very difficult for a government to successfully oppress it's own people and so the surface structure of the government pretty much falls to whatever works best for the alliance in question.

That leaves foreign policy, which is essentially the only area that political philosophy has any relevance in CN because it's the only time views really compete with each other. In this arena we have realpolitik versus idealism, we have competing views on treaties with regard to number, style and treatment. How do create a scale for the competing beliefs that: you should sign lots of treaties, you should sign no treaties, you should sign nothing higher than an MDP, you should sign nothing with an A clause, you shouldn't join blocs, you shouldn't have overlapping blocs, treaties shouldn't chain, treaties should chain, treaties in their cancelation period should still be followed, treaties in their cancelation period should be ignored, treaties should only be signed with close friends, treaties should be signed for political advantage, treaties should be followed to the letter, the spirit should always be followed regardless of the letter, alliances can't join a war without treaaty obligations, alliances can do whatever they want, then you get into the myriad number of potential CBs and which are valid, what constitues aggression, declaration of war or CB-worthy action.

There is very little correlation between any one of these beliefs and holding any other, so even where you are able to create a scale from leeft to right, trying to map an alliance to it would give you nonsensical results.

Point taken.

Perhaps in the minute elements of the game, in the various treaties and such, there are no clear correlations to RL politics. Still, though, it seems to me that in some of the more abstract aspects of the game, certain parallels might exist. There are only a few ways to be economically prosperous in CN, granted, but the way alliances wield the might that comes with economic strength seems like it can be abused as much as in real life: the thwarting of political expression or the destruction of certain subgroups or subcultures, for instance. But this economic strength derives from the value that players put into "pixels": the charts, graphs, and pie charts that mark one's "progress." If no one cared about pixels, or if war was not an option in the game, there would be limitless free expression and creativity (the purported goal of both leftist and rightist politics, although the former tends to find it outside of capitalism, the latter within it). The interesting thing about the game is that it constantly thwarts any arrival at that goal, just as in real life. The crux of the game, its generative force, seems to lie in the pixel and the possibility of taking it away (through war), and from that develops a whole spectrum of freedoms and restrictions. That is why, in some sense, Vox Populi, which cared nought for pixels, was able to mount a challenge, at almost a meta-level, to the existing structures of power. Of course, that slippage, or possibility of revolution, was quickly reabsorbed into traditional modes of organizing power on Planet Bob: new treaties, new blocs, etc. As Marx said of the 1848 revolution in France:

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."

"What it had conceived as the most revolutionary event turned out in reality to be the most counter-revolutionary."

What would it take to radically revolutionize the political structure of Planet Bob?

Edited September 2, 2009 by brokenhead

[Melchior]

Is the game really completely autonomous from RL, then? There is no possible translation? What does it mean, in an abstract sense, that thousands of people from all over the world come together quite frequently to connect, in sometimes quite involved ways? Does this inform people's RL politics, and vice versa? How?

There is almost dictatorship (or meritocracy as we call it) in all alliance, yet they all implement a very socialist economical structure, including heavy military requirements imposed on every member, such as attainment of nuclear weaponry. Either you can't translate that, or most alliances are poor, communist countries.

[SiCkO]

Idealist/Friends>Infra <--> Pragmatist/Infra Hugger

Internationalist/Treaty Whore <--> Isolationist/Neutral Menace

Treaty Whore just had to lol at that

imo new ideas is what keeps CN fresh kudos to any alliance that comes up with a new inventive idea, i know i would love to see spying come back just for the kick of seeing alliances catching one others spies at the same time and both posting Ultimatums to the other at almost the same time

The economy of the New Polar Order is highly controlled, to a higher degree than starter aid and aid programs to help grow newbies. I really shouldn't go too much further into detail

tell us your seekrit econ operations!

[brokenhead]

What would it take to radically revolutionize the political structure of Planet Bob?

I now know the answer to my own question: beans.

[Triyun]

IRL almost all but a few Imperial Officers are too left of center, to different degrees. From me being a democrat to Vladimir being a commie.

I would not characterize Francoism as right wing, I would characterize it as the equivalent of Marxism-Leninism in Planet Bob. Of course there are only a few things separating Marxism-Leninism (note differentiating it from other marxisms) and Fascism as both are totalitarian ideologies, economic policy is the primary area of separation and that is not quite as applicable in this game. Foreign policy wise, all sides of the political spectrum are self justifying and aggrandizing depending on your perspective. It is very hard to claim anything there. If you look at international relations theory IRL it is very hard to put a label on the foreign policies of the various groups here imo.

[White Chocolate]

In terms of CN alliance policy stances, to my surprise I find myself more often agreeing with people who in RL politics lean to the right. In real life, I'm politically rather liberal. I think it's because as an alliance, United under Scorn (US) is more idealistic than pragmatic and an uncomplicated "no shade of grey" stance is something that appeals to people who also happen to personally be along the right wing of the RL U.S. politics. In real life politics, I'm closer to liberal BECAUSE I can see exceptions in most "rules." Abortion is wrong - okay , but what about... CN is much more simple. As long as we agree on what CN ideals we have, it works and we get along great. I'm also personally rather conservative when it comes to my personal finances too and, as pointed out, here that is not very complicated.

Thus, unless a particular alliance makes it a point to specifically recruit members of a particular political belief system AND advertises that fact, I don't think RL politics have anything to do with CN. INT (who also is our protector) is a good example. Many of them may hold personally very leftist ideals but when it comes to CN politics and their alliance policies, they (at least the leadership) are very pragmatic. LOL - thus we're the protected and they are the protectors. No big surprise there

Edited September 3, 2009 by White Chocolate

[Vladimir]

It seems that two questions are being asked here: to what extent does Bobian politics reflect RL politics, and to can a Bobian political axis be developed.

In regards to the first -- to what extent does Bobian politics reflect RL politics -- the answer is: a lot. We can look at the vast majority of early alliances, and a majority of current alliances (though as time goes on more and more adapt to our real circumstances), and see that they are based on the accepted liberal democratic ideals of the countries most members come from. So we find individual rights, supreme courts, electoral democracy, ministers, and so forth, alongside the idealistic foreign policy goals (however well or badly they are kept to in practice) propagated by most governments. These are rarely a result of deep thought about what will best work, but rather an instinctive 'common sense' that derives from every day experience in another world. We can also see more conscious attempts to implement socialist or conservative systems in the explicit left/right modelled alliances, but these likewise come from an idealistic base of simple structure plagiarism.

Of course, even where there is a conscious attempt to prevent such RL plagiarism we still find heavy influence. I make no secret that the writings of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and others on the far left as well as the likes of Nietzsche, Rousseau and lesser known academics heavily influence my own writings, both in inspiring me on certain subjects and in the materialist methodology I use. Others are similar, sometimes more obviously, sometimes less; sometimes more consciously, sometimes less. This is inevitable as our own thoughts are a result of the environment they find themselves in, both material and intellectual -- this environment being primarily RL.

One might argue that judging this deeper philosophical base is what we must look at to discover whether an alliance is 'left' or 'right', as Comrade EuroSoviet's famously did in 2007. This brings us neatly onto the second question -- can a Bobian political axis be developed.

The problem here lies in the classless nature of our world. Ultimately when looking at the RL axis you are judging which class a person supports more than anything else -- Bismark is not left wing just because he founded the welfare state, nor is fascism just because it interfered in the economy (given that said interference was based around breaking the socialist and union movement, lowering wages, and returning control of the economy to private property). In the absence of such class antagonisms we find that economies converge along the same lines, divergence basing itself simply on how advanced the technical structures are. This isn't to say that some idealism doesn't sneak in. I've heard of left wing folk trying to create more egalitarian structures and right wing folk refusing to give 'welfare', but these tend to be exceptions that prove the rule (and the alliances rarely last long as a result). So economy -- the basis of the left-right axis -- simply isn't a factor.

There is a likewise a degree of convergence in the nature of internal politics. One does not live in a territory but rather signs up voluntarily to enter the apparatus of a state, meaning that the state is rather all-encompassing and the question becomes one primarily of the structures and cultures within it. But how do you judge these along an axis? Democracy/autocracy? This would require an extremely detailed survey of alliances and would inevitably be marred by prejudice about what is to be considered and what is democratic, as well as the point that Delta made about all alliances being fundamentally democratic by their nature as voluntary organisations in the first place.

So what about foreign policy? Do you go along an aggressive/defensive axis? A pragmatic/idealistic axis? Given how much debate there is here I doubt you will ever be able to reach any degree of consensus -- all your friends are doing exactly what they claim while all your enemies are lying through their teeth. The result would be that every person would draw up a different graph.

Ultimately this leaves us with two options. We can look at the RL political orientation of the philosophies that underpin an alliance's outlook (every alliance has a philosophy, even if it isn't codified as Francoism is). Or you can begin to develop abstract concept that tie into the very root of our own material world much as the class nature of the real world does.

The former is, I feel, too difficult, given the wide range of influences and the controversy that would surround any attempt to weight them. Though I will simultaneously also always feel that the NPO is more genuinely 'left' than the superficially self-professed far left alliances as a result of our philosophical basis.

The latter is effectively what I have tried to do in the past, albeit somewhat unintentionally. In The Meaning of Freedom I created an absolute freedom/security axis to demonstrate the correlation between reduced conflict and alliance development, but this can also be used to explain the underlying philosophy of an alliance. Of course, such an idea leaves the categories of left and right with no link whatsoever to the real world categories of left and right, but if you want to create a political spectrum in a new material world you have to be prepared to abandon the old one.

[A tired and rushed Vladimir reserves the right for absolutely none of this rambling off-the-cuff non-proof-read analysis to make any sense whatsoever to the reader.]

[Delta1212]

I think the best summary of the points most of us including myself are trying to make is as follows:

Any system which encourages both competition and cooperation by participants will likely see similarities in broad political patterns, however, most political philosophies deal with the specific forces driving the competitive/cooperative atmosphere, and in systems which have different forces working on them than others, political philosophies are generally non-transferable between the two in part or in their entirety depending on how great the divergence is.

[Gauner]

Being a political junkie, I've noticed all the RL politics spilling into Planet Bob in subtle or not-so-subtle ways, and I'm wondering if it's possible to create a spectrum that places alliances in left, centrist, or right categories. Perhaps it's not possible, given the multiple perspectives that come together in one alliance. But are there tendencies we can discern? These tendencies can appear in 3 (maybe more) ways:

1. Explicit political stance: e.g., the Anti-Hippie alliance and other self-styled "conservative" alliances. How much of these names is IC and how much OOC? How does it determine the make-up of the membership?

Oh the price of fame!

[Magina]

Oh the price of fame!

Word XD

[brokenhead]

snip.

Thanks for the analysis. Let me see if I can reply to a few of your points.

1. It is difficult to map Marxism onto CN politics, as you have attempted, quite extraordinarily, in my opinion, to do. The absolute freedom/savagery <---> security/sovereign axis you propose, for instance, is not exactly Marxist because it stops at the feudalist stage (perhaps as far as you can go in CN). It retains, however, Marx/Hegel's general sense of progressive history, along with your emphasis on material reality (more on this in my second point). Also, for Marx, conflict is necessary to propel the dialectic of history forward, rather than diffused in a totalitarian model of government, which is simply a replication of the factory. (Marxism =/= totalitarianism, as numerous 20C Marxists have been at pains to demonstrate.) The only state of security, or stasis, Marx might propose is the state that will arise after the collapse of capitalism. But this wasn't really sketched out by Marx.

2. One of the main things I'm interested in, and this is something that Francoism doesn't address, are non-economic politics: gender, race, sexuality, media, art. Part of the "material reality" that underpins CN is the Internet, the computers we are all using to interact with each other. How does this reality, this media(ted) communication contribute to the kind of politics that CN enables beyond the nation page and into the forums? Because I think it's in the forums where the politics of CN take place in much more interesting, complex ways than on the nation page, which can be reduced, in the last instance, to mathematical formulas and pixels. There's all kinds of queer goings-on in the forums, and by queer I mean queer. So, first: how does our Internet reality alter the kinds of things we can do in here? From a Marxist perspective, one could turn to Benjamin, Kracaeur, and the Frankfort school, or Jameson to interpret this aspect (this is a philosophy that has yet to be developed in CN, one that could form an alternative, perhaps an [actual] "supplement," to Francoism). Second, how do non-economic politics factor into both the nation page (probably not much) and the forums (a lot)?

Apologies for a wall of text.

And enjoy your fame, AHF - but I must say, I'm afraid, that I love hippies.

Edited September 4, 2009 by brokenhead

[brokenhead]

In terms of CN alliance policy stances, to my surprise I find myself more often agreeing with people who in RL politics lean to the right. In real life, I'm politically rather liberal. I think it's because as an alliance, United under Scorn (US) is more idealistic than pragmatic and an uncomplicated "no shade of grey" stance is something that appeals to people who also happen to personally be along the right wing of the RL U.S. politics. In real life politics, I'm closer to liberal BECAUSE I can see exceptions in most "rules." Abortion is wrong - okay , but what about... CN is much more simple. As long as we agree on what CN ideals we have, it works and we get along great. I'm also personally rather conservative when it comes to my personal finances too and, as pointed out, here that is not very complicated.

Thus, unless a particular alliance makes it a point to specifically recruit members of a particular political belief system AND advertises that fact, I don't think RL politics have anything to do with CN. INT (who also is our protector) is a good example. Many of them may hold personally very leftist ideals but when it comes to CN politics and their alliance policies, they (at least the leadership) are very pragmatic. LOL - thus we're the protected and they are the protectors. No big surprise there

Now I wonder if that comraderie would carry over into real life. Because here's an instance of two groups that usually just yell at each other actually communicating (about something completely different, but still....).

And this makes me wonder again about the slippage between the game and real life, and if, or how often, it occurs.

[Kzoppistan]

One could probably devise a set of guide posts to a political spectrum by asking certain questions and basing the results in a synthesized nolan scale/chart.

Such questions like:

"Do you believe a new member to an alliance deserves aid?"

"Do you think nations without an alliance deserve to be attacked?"

Ect., ect.,.

One could concoct a scale of aggression on one pole, and a scale of economic conservation on another. You could make it even more dynamic by including more things like degree of in-groups vs. out-groups (the whole CN, color spheres, just allies and protectorates, just protectorates, just the alliance alone, so on, so on), level of acceptable risk in foreign affairs, nation rights.

Really, a whole new political spectrum could be devised mostly independent of outside rl politics.

Edited September 4, 2009 by Kzoppistan